http://kyleandkrystal.pflug.com

you folded a napkin in half
neatly, like your underwear
and scribbled down the crease
(a mythology of unions!)

it’s thumbtacked to the wall
a memoir to an end of worlds

like when we used to fall
wrapped in blankets,
to the floor and lie.

(on and to each other)
(with and through each other)

observe how closely the end of the academic year resembles the end of the world

observe a smiling emo armageddon,

and join him in laughter and autopastiche.

And to his miscreant neighbors and compatriots:
a phallic salute and nasty words. We’re done here.

[springtime and ends
like pilots and bends–
up is not up, and where’s
down anymore?]

T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land has earned itself a place in the canons of important and revolutionary literature, despite alleged obscurity that many argue renders it inaccessible and without any sort of narrative coherence. However, that incoherence which is often dismissed as a side effect of Eliot’s nervous breakdown is more than coincident with the poem; it is in fact essential as a poetic and structural device. Moreover, a serious analysis of the poem reveals underlying structural mechanics which reveal an organization based not on mental instability, but rather on a more sublime understanding of incoherence as foundational to the natural condition in an elemental and spiritual sense. Understanding The Waste Land in context of its former title, “He do the Police in Different Voices,” we find that perspective shifts, situatedness, and narrative incoherence are as essential to Eliot’s understanding of the human condition as they are to our understanding of The Waste Land.

The opening of the poem with “April is the cruelest month” and the change to the title “The Waste Land” are products of Eliot’s revision process and the edits made by Ezra Pound, which dropped substantial material from the poem. The movement of the title internalizes the poem and changes the focus somewhat (Fornero 3), but is valuable in the consideration of the poem in that it reveals some of Eliot’s vision for the layout of the work writ large. Specifically, it is illuminative of the concept of a diversity of voice, a broad semiotic intertextualism that is consistent with the changes of speaker, mood, and method throughout the body of the work. The Waste Land significantly dodges any theme of unifying consciousness or real thematic cohesion, and the resultant work must be examined by way of “submit[ting] one’s own experience to its embodied ‘meaning’” (Easthope 331). It is, in the words of Bernard Bergonzi, “an anguished reliving of subjective experience,” a postsymbolist analogue of the lived experience as much in form as it is in content.

The five sections of the poem roughly correspond to the natural elements – earth, air, fire, water, and mystical aether (V. Eliot 414), respectively. “The Burial of the Dead” deals explicitly with spring and birth, earth, and burial (1, 19-30, 60-76), and introduces London as the surreal and superreal/Unreal City. The movement in the next section begins to pose interesting questions for a broader-spectrum interpretation of the poem. As noted by Fornero, the revisions in “A Game of Chess” point towards a movement distinctly away from anthropomorphic and mimetic descriptions and towards a functional symbology which describes the chess board and by analogy the lived condition in terms of systems and their interconnections. Fornero argues that the changes in the game of chess from the draft versions to the final version rule out a mimetic interpretation of the text (Fornero 3), but in fact this movement seems to be not away from a mimetic reading, but rather towards a mimetic analogy focused on a semiotic perspective on the human condition.

The “Game of Chess” passage gathers an eclectic set of references, from the figure of Cleopatra to the legend of Philomel to the cockney woman in 139-172. Read as an incoherent set of individual narratives collected loosely by the themes of death and tarnished glory, “A Game of Chess” is functional as a mimetic commentary on human networks and their segregatedness in a world that is “tarnished.” In many ways we have a useful antithesis in “that Shakespearian Rag” mentioned in 128-130. The clean, staccato tempo of “It’s so elegant / so intelligent” stands contrary to the relatively formless whole of the section, in keeping with the section’s emphasis on past over present and on modernity as a tarnished and disconnected thing. Philomel’s rape (98-100) by the king is the triumph of chaos as a calamitous force over order as a lost norm; it is a disorder “rudely forced.”

Eliot’s resistance to traditional order is made incarnate specifically in his use of temporality. Time in The Waste Land is far from strictly linear. Rather, time is relative to the subject, and past and future coexist as intimation and intuition in the reader’s present (Singh 35). The sexual connotation of “jug jug” in 204-205, “so rudely forc’d,” recalls the rape of Philomel and looks ahead to the exploitation of the Thames daughters. The Thames’ rape is in some ways reported in a subdued tone by comparison to the repeated hypersexual “jug, jug, jug” of Philomel’s, but simultaneously the underreported tone emphasizes the pitiable duplicity of the rapist himself, who “promised a ‘new start.’” This notion of complex identity is central to the protagonist, who here is analogued to Tiresias – he has been variously male and female, and the protagonist’s androgeny is cemented in Tiresias’ pan-sexuality and his own homosexual encounter in 213-214. Here manifested in the protagonist is the casualness of the most intimate and deviant of intercourse; later (and thematically simultaneous) is the likewise casual sexual encounter of the typist with the young man in 225-256. The removal of significance from sexuality is equally present in the undramatic rape of the Thames (299’s “what should I resent?”) as in the flippant sexual encounters of the protagonist and Mr. Eugenides, or the typist and the young man. Thus lust over meaning and alienation over commonality emerge as the direct descendents of the Fisher King’s fertility legends.

The entrance of fire literally as a generalized sterilizing and purifying force, as well as a sort of moral catharsis, is a deus ex machina to destroy disorder. The unification in 308-309 of western and eastern asceticism calls not for any particular deity, but rather sends out in broad spectrum a call for purging fire to end what Eliot vilifies as the decayed modernity. “The Fire Sermon” then serves as an especially useful artifact in studying the structure of the poem as a whole, as it is effectively the same technique of semiotic incoherence in microcosm. The section is unified by lust as a thematic device, yet in every instance different. The opening by allusion to the rosy-in-retrospect past offers contrast to the following string of disastrous sexual experiences. It is in the network of Philomel, Eugenides, the young man and his typist, and Thames that we encounter rape and casual sexual experiences as isolated symbols for chaos and apathy which together frame the mimetic commentary of “The Fire Sermon” as a whole. It is in the space between rape and a weekend homosexual encounter, between exploitation and apathy, that Eliot exposes the faded veneer of modernity for sanitization and reinvigoration by fire. As Singh notes,

It is absolutely necessary while reading The Waste Land to remain alart to the concealed correlations among different scenes, situations, events, incidents, symbols, images, phrases, and words.” (Singh 38)

For the reader to lose sight of Eliot’s contextuality is to lose the naturalistic webbed nature of the poem as a whole.

Returning to the overall elemental containers for the poem, namely the five sections, the same connectivity emerges in macrocosm. The poem defies linear presentation (Tomlinson); thus “Death by Water” immediately recalls “The Burial of the Dead” and the dry stone which “gives no sound of water” (24). Likewise even without explicit mention in the text, connections to a regenerative flood of Biblical proportions are inevitable, and the suggestion of resurrection in Phlebas further extend the contextual significance of the water image. Yet as much as water offers invigorating life to the dry rocks in I, it is inevitably the enemy of the purifying fire of III. It looks associatively forward to “What the Thunder Said,” where the paradox is further explored. 345-359 explore water as life-giving, offering a plea for the “drip drop drip drop drop drop drop” – a plea that is textually simultaneous to “Death by Water.”

In that the fifth section is identified with aether, it is from the outset set apart from the other four, as a recapitulation of the ideas presented in microcosm in each element and as a consummation of those ideas cumulatively into a new whole. The idea of rain falling is traditionally rejuvenative, and in this context serves as an artifact symbolizing potential – something that is seriously considered for the first time in “What the Thunder Said.” The mention of lightning and “a damp gust / Bringing rain” (394, 395) comes syncronous with a treatment of the Chapel Perilous as the terminus of the Arthurian knight’s quest for the Grail. Thus rejuvenation and spiritual renewal in a cosmic sense (as the possibility of new patterns for civilization) come at the expense of myth; life postdates the death of the Fisher King.

The cock’s crowing as the harbinger of dawn – “Co co rico co co rico” (394) – explicitly contrasts with the more guttural onomatepoieas of the poem – the oblivious “O O O O” of the Shakespearean Rag (128) and the bestial “Jug jug jug jug jug jug” of sex and exploitation (204); likewise it is distinct from the apathetic and droning sonority of the Thames’ song,

Weialala leia

Wallala leialala (276-77, 290-91, 306)

Eliot establishes meaning by way of associative contrast; in this example, the onomatepoetic sounds are phonally linked and thus at least in some way cotemporal. These passages connected and contrasting by sound and attitude – optimistic versus bleak, sonorous versus guttural – hold a place within a larger lattice of meaning. Extrapolated to the scope of the entire poem, it takes shape not as a linear procession of parts, nor as a set of thematically unified ruminations, but rather as a semantic web of associations and relationships between parts.

“What the Thunder Said” provides finality and summation to the ideas latticed in the four elemental sections prior. The protagonist speaks of the Unreal City’s collapse, of plundering bountiful sea with desert in the past, of refining fire and the journey out from Inferno. In the swallow (429) the reader is exposed again to Spring, not now as the cruellest month, but as a more typical symbol of rebirth and infusal of life. In Datta, Dayadhvam, Damyata (give, sympathize, control), the Hindu Upanishad dialogue, the voice of thunder itself becomes a call to actionally embrace spiritual renewal (Ramazani, Ellmann and O’Clair 486). Thus water, earth, air, and fire all collide and are redistributed in the final passage, which alleges to offer shantih, the “Peace which passeth understanding” – yet as Chandran argues, this is like “the wise men of Judah whom the Lord rebukes” for saying “Peace, peace; when there is no peace” (Chandran 683). The irony of this as a capstone to the poem is that the fragmentary essence of the poem is as inescapable in art as it is in nature.

Eliot’s work in The Waste Land exposes hierarchies of relationships and angles of seeing, and it is in this sense that the work is as much a Cubist piece as it is a stream-of-consciousness poem. Yet this perspective on the poem contributes to the poem’s integrity; form is part and particle of any artifact’s whole, and The Waste Land is no exception. It is a mistake to dismiss The Waste Land as inaccessible or amimetic, when in fact it strives to be the most genuine kind of accessible by directly emulating the human condition even in form. Eliot’s own words describe th epoem as “the relief of a personal grouse against life” (V. Eliot 1), putting to death any notion that the poem is somehow apersonal or transcendant, and emphasizing that it is basically human. As an associative set of symbols, cultural memes, and anthropological commentary, it is narrative in the same sense that anything genuinely human is narrative; loosely at best. This makes Eliot’s acheivement here not “abstruse,” but rather genuine; not “modern,” but rather animal; not “significant,” but rather sublime.

Bibliography of Works Consulted

Beagle, Donald. “T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.” Explicator (2002): 40-41.

Bergonzi, Bernard. “Maps of The Waste Land.” Encounter 38 (1972): 81.

Chandran, K. Narayana. “”Shantih” in The Waste Land.” American Literature 61 (1989): 681-683.

Easthope, Anthony. “”The Waste Land” as a Dramatic Monologue.” English Studies (1983): 330-344.

Eliot, Thomas Stearns. “The Waste Land.” 1998. Bartleby.com. New York: Boni and Liveright, 1922. 1 May 2007 <www.bartleby.com/201/>.

Eliot, Valerie, ed. The waste land: a facsimile and transcript of the original drafts including the annotations of Ezra Pound. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc, 1971.

Fornero, Caterina. “Chess is the Game Wherein I’ll Catch the Conscience of the King: The Metaphor of the Game of Chess in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land.” Yeats Eliot Review 22 (2005): 2-7.

Fowler, D.C. “The Waste Land: Mr. Eliot’s “Fragments”.” College English 14 (1953): 234-235.

Helmling, Steven. “The Grin of Teresias: Humor in The Waste land.” Twentieth Century Literature 36 (1990): 137-154.

Miller, James E. T.S. Eliot’s Personal Waste Land: Exorcism of the Demons. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1977.

Nanny, Max. “‘Cards are Queer’: A New Reading of the Tarot in The Waste land.” English Studies 62 (1981): 335-348.

Ramazani, Jahan, Richard Ellmann and Robert O’Clair. The Norton Anthology of Modern and Contemporary Poetry. 3rd Edition. Vol. I. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2003. II vols.

Singh, Sukhbir. “T.S. Eliot’s concept of time and the technique of textual reading: A comment on “cross” in The Waste Land 3, line 175.” ANQ 14 (2001): 34-40.

Tomlinson, David. “T.S. Eliot and the Cubists.” Twentieth Century Literature 26 (1980): 64-80.

Walker, Richard J. “Blooming Corpses: Burying the Literary Corpus in the Modern City.” Gothic Studies 4 (2002): 1-14.

♦

g can

s
urPas
s

the m

y
SteR
y

of

s
tiLnes
s

– e.e. cummings

we pass fake smiles like cannabis
all around the circle
all around the circle
round and round the circle

if you could taste the brief sublime of the false freely given!
to know that,
to know you,
to know everything.

make it a dream like you have made love
make it a goal like I have made you mine.

First I’ll stop kissing you
and then I’ll start holding you.
And you might cry,
to think of things gone.

Pulling Out

First I’ll stop kissing you,
and then I’ll start holding you.
And you might cry out,
thinking of things gone.

Birth Control

First I’ll stop kissing you
and then I’ll start holding you.
And you might cry,
thinking of things gone.

A Manifesto Which Says STOP THINKING
- or -
It’s Apparently That Time of the Month for Kyle Pflug

Two thoughts.

One: This game has too many rules.
Two: That’s because it’s not an effing game.

Sociology, communication studies, even theology and philosophy have obsessively constrained relationships and basic methods of human interaction into boxes. Here we have this absurd world in which, to the eyes of academia, every potential human reaction or relationship is an experiment in a bottle, a tiny little longitudinal cohort hurtling through space and time unaware of the scrutinous eyes it delights with every twist and unpredictability. And all this content in that Grand Experiment dances, sometimes predictably, sometimes, terrifyingly – but dances nevertheless, to steps and customs and conventions. Smile at him and unless something’s wrong, he’ll smile back, steps in a dance, lead and follow, push and persevere.

All this isn’t so bad, when (IF!) “steps in a dance” is considered one semantic step away from “life” – and for us, it really is. Our metaphor for life is invariably “game” – and it’s not really a stretch to say that games are metaphors and microcosms for life. But ah! There is in all this a place for righteous, unadorned outrage that flares like magnesium fire. In becoming so accustomed to toggling from real-world to the metaphor of a game, we have accustomed ourselves to demeaning, belittling, and complicating all the things which should be the holiest of simplicities.

Take that paradigm of impossibility, the demigod of complex relationships: the couple. Consider what we prescribe to it in metaphor! The couple is governed by layers and layers of bureaucratic  law – the DTR, the anniversary, the Promise Ring or the make-out or the apology or the fight or skirmish or scuffle; the love or the not, the commitment or the lack, the thrill! or the boredom.

Take a cross-section of our hypothetical pair, or of any human coupling – employee and employer, mother and child, husband and wife – and talk about it. Where do we get that rich and laudably obsessive taxonomy of bullshit that we use to label ourselves? What are these studies of self-concept that we’ve evolved in academics and professionalism over the years? When a psychologist can diagnose our repressed sexuality, or a friend can label us “pacifiers” because we don’t know what we want for dinner.

Radical idea: mentally resort to the primitive, if only for a moment. Take that couple and render them bestially simple. Now throw away the taxonomy of bullshit, and consider again our cross-section. How do we describe two human beings who lie next to each other in bed? Who feel certain feelings and do certain things for one another?

Radical idea part deux: we describe them as two human beings who lie next to each other, feel certain feelings, and do certain things. We resort to that essential component of humanity, which is the fact that we are human and nothing else. Not civilization, sentience, language, or science. Likewise our two human beings are defined by their relationship not jargonically, but in terms of actuals: where they lie, when they touch, what they want, and what they feel.

WE’VE INVENTED FOR OURSELVES A METASYSTEM AND WE ARE SLAVES TO IT! “I cannot love, because I am not ready! I cannot live, because I do not know how! I cannot risk, because I haven’t the right!”

We are fooling ourselves. The rules are invented and so is our slavery to them. Pick for yourself a system if you will, but never claim that the system chose you – for it did not. If I establish a morality it is rules earned actionally, not accidentally. If I deign to limit myself, and turn about and complain, I have committed a foolishness.

Here is a call simply to throw off the borders that we don’t have faith in. Never should our own autoanalysis form a definition of what we are capable; never should our own self-concept become limiting rather than just a convenient descriptor for the mean of our collected behaviors and attitudes. What I am historically is a description, not a doom.

By all means I should choose and freely give myself to constraints that I faithfully desire; but when we slave ourselves to rules out of lack of faith in our basic humanity, we fail that humanity. When the divine simplicity of two people who love fails because of the overwhelming weight of the alphabet with which they try to spell love, they have failed that humanity and that divinity.

Live. Live. Live. Live. ]]> http://kyle.pflug.com/2007/04/18/stasis/feed/ http://kyle.pflug.com/2007/04/16/eleutherios/ http://kyle.pflug.com/2007/04/16/eleutherios/#comments Mon, 16 Apr 2007 16:50:28 +0000 Kyle Poetry http://kyle.pflug.com/2007/04/16/eleutherios/ Bacchus won’t fall in love with me
he tied my hands to the cherry tree
and made sport with the rest of me
but Bacchus won’t fall in love with me.

he has cigarette breath and cigarette eyes
and a cigarette tongue and cigarette wiles
and like silk and smoke he has cigarette smiles
but Bacchus can’t fall in love with me.

he bought flowers and he made me free
and showed me things he said I could be
but Bacchus never let me be,
Bacchus never fell in love with me.

dry reservoirs for fountain pens
ends, ends, ends, ends.

I see priority as decreasing from first to third and causality as flowing from third to first. That is, Spiritual integrity trumps social trumps professional.

Yet professional commitments are also a manner of personal integrity, and thus I would not, for example, skip out on work because of a social need in most circumstances.In terms of causality, I think each depends on the next. For example, professional integrity precedes social precedes spiritual.

We cannot be right with God unless we are living rightly with those around us and with those who we have pledged our labor to. In that sense from 3 to 1 on the priority scale we have an inverted flow of the least ‘important’ enabling the most ‘important’.

As far as my own life, I think I have a long ways to go, but the past several months have been enormous growth periods for me in conceptualizing how I want to prioritize my life and implementing that. I think that this system will never diminish the significance of any commitment, since I think all commitments carry with them the full weight of spiritual/internal integrity; at the same time, I think that this system allows a person to make commitments intelligently and structure a life not according to whim, but according to what really matters – something which is bottomlessly important to me.